Suburban California White Supremacists at Center of Charlottesville Hate Conspiracy Case - Los Angeles Times
Great to see the prosecution. California need not be an exporter of hate.
When Benjamin Drake Daley arrived in Charlottesville, Va. from Redondo Beach, he stopped by Walmart to pick up supplies: white athletic tape, black spray paint and a folding tactical knife.
Later that day in August 2017, prosecutors say, Daley taped his fists as if he were a boxer or mixed martial arts fighter and showed up at the University of Virginia, where he marched through campus with hundreds of torch-toting white supremacists shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans.
Daley and several others had traveled from California on behalf of the so-called Rise Above Movement, a relatively small militant white power group based in Southern California that casts itself as an alt-right fight club. Its members meet regularly in public parks to practice boxing and other street-fighting techniques to unleash on political foes.
For more than a year, authorities say, the group has caused trouble across California, at political rallies in places such as Berkeley and Huntington Beach. They are an odd collection of true believers; one worked as an aerospace engineer for Northrop Grumman, another at a hot dog restaurant. It appears far-right politics and hate brought them together, and after the chaos in Charlottesville, they began to receive national attention.